Two Foundations

Why do we need two foundations?Fri 05/14/04 10:43:42 am By GEORGE PORTER

Do you realize that we usually have two foundations under our homes most of the time these days? And, the reason is because it is the only way to get the money for the home!

Way back when "Trailers" were invented they were pulled all over the country by cars and parked in trailer parks where they would sit on their wheels until the owners of the "coach" would decide to go someplace else. If they liked the trailer park they might stay longer and slip a couple of "props" of some kind under the corners so it wouldn't bounce when you walked around in it. If it got cold then sometimes people would surround the underside at the edges of the home with some kind of barrier to sort of cut the wind under the home and the floors were a bit warmer. They called it "skirting" because it looked like a sort of a "skirt" on the home. It not only made the floors warmer but it also improved the appearance of the home as well. 'Kind of finished it off and hid the wheels and frame. It made it look more like a conventional home instead of some kind of a wagon or car.

As time went on and more and more folks started living in "mobile home parks", one of the most prevalent "lot restrictions" was that your home had to have skirting, because it made the community look better. No doubt about it, our homes do look a whole lot better with skirting, or ground enclosure if you prefer. Nobody objected much and it became the standard all around the country. With this new standard we got better looking but it created a new kind of environment under the home and some new problems we hadn't had before. We made it very necessary to control the moisture under the home, both with grading and with venting. In an effort to improve the appearance of the homes and make them look more like what folks thought "real houses" should look like, we trapped an environment under the homes that we now had to properly control. When there was no such thing as skirting there was always plenty of air under there and if a footing was sitting in a puddle and sinking you could easily see it happening and took the steps to make it stop. Now the area was out of sight and, as the saying goes, out of mind. Many homes over the last 50 years have had floor problems because they made their HUD Code home look better with skirting but didn't take the trouble to do all the rest that having skirting requires.

Our homes and everyone else's homes as well, are always affected by structural changes. You don't just "tack" something to the home and think you haven't changed the structure somehow. . Several times in the last few years I have heard people say that they are going to shift to the modular side of the business. A very large dealer said to me that the HUD stuff is not selling so he is going to switch over to mostly modular homes on his sales lots. He really did not want to do it because the "trailers" were much f...

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